Our View: PHA has work cut out with Taft relocations

Thursday

Feb 20, 2014 at 10:33 PM

Let us go way out on a limb and predict that there is no place in Peoria where the PHA can relocate current Taft Homes residents without opposition.

We saw some of that Wednesday night when a packed house of residents in the city’s West Lake Avenue area in the Fourth Council District proved themselves not exactly shy about objecting to a proposal for a 30-unit low income development there. At this writing another meeting was scheduled for Thursday night regarding another housing plan involving the former Greeley School on NE Jefferson near Peoria’s Downtown, which is but a few blocks from the existing Taft Homes on the city’s riverfront.

The latter is destined for demolition, which on balance makes sense on a prime piece of real estate that essentially serves as the city’s front door, and not a very attractive or inviting one, at that. It had its time but that time is over. It would be foolish and then some to pour more money into maintaining it. Its presence effectively stops a fair amount of economic growth to the north of Downtown that otherwise may be ripe for it, and that would serve the city well on the whole.

That said, we anticipated that finding alternative housing for the approximately 520 people who now live there would be no picnic, and no doubt the PHA did, too. As always, there are racial and economic class overtones to these sorts of discussions that sometimes do not speak well of those who hold such biases, and sometimes can be forgiven. Drug traffic and violent crime, vandalism and declining property values have been associated with public housing, and it’s hard to blame those who would be wary of living next door to that. There is always a fair amount of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) sentiment in any community, and some of that may be in play here, though it’s not necessarily restricted to public housing. A lot of folks don’t want to live next to a Walmart, either, or as we’ve witnessed recently on the city’s more affluent northwest side, next to a ballfield.

But ultimately poor people need a place to live, too. Most of them want everything that more advantaged Peorians want — a safe and quiet place to call home for themselves and their families. Trust us, there would be critics if the PHA planted them 10 miles out in the country, too. In any case, that’s not an option here, as so many residents are dependent on urban services, especially public transportation.

Ultimately, the concentration of poverty is what helps produce so many undesirable consequences. To the degree possible, the PHA should keep these developments to a manageable size, and disperse them around the community so that the burden on any single neighborhood is not too great. Ultimately the poor among us are not going away, the community on the whole has a role to play here, and the PHA still has its work cut out.